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What's up with Firefox!

I am really unhappy with Firefox today. On version 65.0 we no longer have a choice to disable automatic updates in the preferences. Also when I look at about:config I can verify that I have app.update.auto set to false. Even with my update option clearly stated, Firefox presents me with this:

"Sorry. We just need to do one small thing to keep going. We have just installed an update in the background. Click Restart Firefox to finish applying it."

To really rub salt in the wound, there is a big "Restart Firefox" button now displayed on every new tab. In other words, not only is Firefox ignoring my explicit preference to not auto update, but they are apparently forcing it. I have no further access to Firefox in this configuration until I consent to a restart/update. I'm boiling....

I hope that I'm missing something here, but it looks to me as if Mozilla is following the lead of Windows 10 where users are force fed the updates with no option to keep control in the hands of the users. In the meantime, my Firefox will stay on the "Restart" screen while I search for a good Firefox replacement.

There are some good Firefox derivatives out there you might want to look at. The one I use is Palemoon. Brave also seems to be a good browser, but I don't know how many distro's package it, and it's 64 bit only for Linux.

Ha! This is fun. I'm posting this by way of the Brave browser. It turns out that Brave is packaged in the Fedora repository (Palemoon wasn't) so Brave is the one I'm checking out first. Browsing through the github codebase, looks like it's a fork of chromium.

That comment brings back memories of a time when someone asked me to build R-Studio to run on a raspberry pi. Cross compilation looked difficult, and the memory requirements for the build exceeded the available ram on the rpi. So I just made a really big swap file and ran the build over the weekend.

Simply installing nodejs and yarn will probably take most of the time I have for one weekend. :) But I'll take a look and see if I can get a working environment set up. Then it can take all week to compile if it wants to.

Installing yarn and nodejs was easier than I expected and only took about two hours.
And the nodejs install seems to include a version of npm, so I don't need to install it.

After cloning the repository both npm and yarn failed in the init phase with a "Cannot find module 'commander'" error, but a quick web search revealed that I had to install the commander module with the command "npm install commander --save".

It's now running in the init phase, which fetches the Chromium source, so it will take a while.

When I check, the src directory is empty and restarting the command restarts the download over from the beginning. I have no idea where it's putting the downloaded data, but it's not in the src directory or (as far as I can tell) in the tmp directory. I've tried twice, and both times it's dropped the connection around the 24 hour mark.

I've spent over two days on it. It doesn't look like there's anyway to make the process work with a standard DSL connection, so I'm not going to waste any more of my time. When the Brave developers decide they want to support 32 bit Linux, I'll consider it. Until then they apparently don't want me or anyone like me.

Hmmm, sad that you are having trouble with downloading big files over a small pipe. Wow 3Mbps is a really tiny pipe these days. You must live on a remote mountain top.

I have an idea of how I might help. You probably know already that `wget -c ... ` will download and pick up where it left off if the connection breaks. Tell me what you need and let me package it into a tar.gz for you and you can fetch it at your convenience with wget.

Actually now that I look at the brave github, I see that it pulls chromium also from github. So you should be able to manually fetch chromium with something like:

> Hmmm, sad that you are having trouble with downloading big files over a small pipe. Wow 3Mbps is a really tiny pipe these days. You must live on a remote mountain top.

Not all that remote, but DSL is the only option available and 3MBps is the best we can get. There's actually a fair amount of the country that's worse off than that, not that the major ISP's will admit it.

> Actually now that I look at the brave github, I see that it pulls chromium also from github.

That seems to be the problem, yes.

> So you should be able to manually fetch chromium with something like:

I probably could, but without parsing through the scripts I have no idea where they want it. And I've tied up our link enough for now.

> Let me know if I can help. With open source, there is always a path to a solution.

There is, but at this point it's not worth the effort. The Brave team has obviously made the decision they're not going to support 32 bit Linux systems, and has made a build system that can't even be used by anyone on a slow connection. Who am I to argue with them? At at certain point, if people write you off, it's best if you return the favor.

' Not all that remote, but DSL is the only option available and 3MBps is the best we can get. There's actually a fair amount of the country that's worse off than that, not that the major ISP's will admit it."

I started using Firefox back when it was Phoenix. I never thought of changing it, but over time it just seemed to get slow and clunky. I ran across Brave not that long ago and I'm pretty happy with it. I also have it installed on my phone and tablet. Unless some drastic problems come up, it's my default as well.

> I started using Firefox back when it was Phoenix. I never thought of changing it,

Likewise, but it wasn't just the poor software performance that was the determining factor for me.

For me, it was the firing of Eich for a political contribution in support of California's proposition 8 he had made years earlier. When they did that it was clear that making good software was way down on their priority list, and there was no hope of the browser ever being any good again.

And even if that wasn't the case, did I really want to use the product of an organization that obviously hates Christian doctrine (and therefore hates me), that much? The obvious answer was no. So I switched to Palemoon and haven't looked back. I stopped using Thunderbird at the same time, for the same reason.